Life Cannot Be Freely Disposed Of

Adam, alerts me to Bryan Caplan full-throated embrace of the suicide fallacy. That is the notion that life must be better than never having been born because people could kill themselves but choose not to.

Bryan says

Why would a minor gift of cash be a clear-cut gain, but a massive gift of human capital be a question mark? In both cases, the recipient seems to have what economists call “free disposal” – a cheap, painless away of getting rid of the unwanted gift. Don’t want $100? Drop it on the sidewalk. Don’t want to be alive? Drop yourself on the sidewalk.

First, dropping one’s self on the sidewalk is neither cheap nor painless. I don’t want to dwell to much on the pain of either plummeting to your death or hitting the sidewalk, but there is some chance that these are non-trivial.

More importantly, however, throwing yourself out of the window has consequences not only for yourself but for everyone you leave behind. It will likely cause sadness among your loved ones. It will cause the world to view you and your family differently, likely with either pity or disdain. Neither of these are desirable for most people and both of them are likely important.

Bryan waves these concerns away but there is evidence that they do indeed weigh heavily in the minds of the suicidal. Suicide watchers say that you should be on high alert when someone starts to say things like

No one would even notice if I am gone

My family would be better off without me

I am just a burden to my family and friends

This tells us that our concern for others is likely a major block to our committing suicide.

Second, and to my mind more importantly, one of the largest downsides of being born is that you have to die. Your death will be painful for your loved ones as discussed above but it’s typically a distinctly unpleasant experience for you as well.

Most people are afraid of death in a way that they are not afraid of non-existence. Thinking about the world just after your death tends to be at minimum unnerving. Thinking about the world billions of years after your death or years before you were born tends not to be so bad.

This indicates that people are concerned about the world in which they have died, not simply about the world in which they don’t exist. Indeed, most people are not troubled that they weren’t born 20 years earlier but would be saddened to know they were going to die 20 years sooner.

Life and death are not smooth inverses of one another because the process of becoming alive creates in most animals a lifelong fear of becoming dead. This is a sunk cost for everyone who is already born but is not for people who are not yet here.

If the reason that people don’t kill themselves is because they are concerned about what will happen to the people they leave behind and because they are afraid of death then these are not arguments for the value of life. Indeed, they are arguments against the value of life.

Why?

Because as soon as someone is born there are condemned to die and almost certainly leave in their wake the pain of loss. The very things they desperately want to avoid have now been made inevitable.

Addendum: I should note that optimism bias is also a likely mitigating factor for suicide. Feelings of hopelessness are another strong warning sign for suicide.

In any case we shouldn’t take the low prevalence of suicide as strong evidence for the irrationality of suicide. If suicide were the rational choice then we would expect that humanity would evolve very quickly towards being irrational.

UPDATE: I am not making an argument here that life is on the whole worth having or not. I think that’s an important question and I think a lot about it. However, I lean towards thinking that (a) Its not a slam-dunk either way, life contains an unpredictable mix of joy and misery and (b) historically some sets of lives have probably had a positive expected value and others not.

12 comments

If suicide were the rational choice then we would expect that humanity would evolve very quickly towards being irrational.

This contains invalid assumptions. I leave it as an exercise for you to identify and correct them. There are, I believe, a few others in your post, as well.

In any event, suicide is almost 100% exclusive to those who are suffering from some variety of clinical depression. They do not represent the typical mode of human existence. In that state, one is probably not capable of rationally considering the externalities of suicide. No general conclusion about the human condition should ever be based on suicide data.

Besides, once having attained life, most of us struggle mightily to hang on to it. Whether this is a good, utility maximizing decision is very much beside the point. There is a huge emotional, and perhaps an additional instinctive hurdle to overcome in order to complete a suicide.

The reasons people don’t commit suicide are
1) It is simply not on the radar screen for the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time.
2) It is neither painless or easy. Though that might be open to other interpretations.

If you’re interested in more of my nattering, I also responded to Adam’s post.

” In that state, one is probably not capable of rationally considering the externalities of suicide. ”

So the evidence has come under fire recently but there were a string of studies which showed that depressed people were more “rational” than none depressed. That is, they had a more accurate view of their own life than do mentally healthy people.

Its important to note that Rationality in the since students of Bias talk about it has nothing to do with mental health per se. It simply is a reflection of whether your beliefs about the world are unbiased estimators of facts about the world.

That is Jazz is rational if and only if betting on Jazz’s beliefs will yield a payoff as high as any algorithm based on the information available to Jazz.

If you read the first paragraph of your link, you’ll see 1) it’s a proposition, not a proven fact; and 2) it applies to those with borderline depression, not the severely depressed who are the suicide candidates. So, sorry, it’s irrelevant.

Something is missing from your penultimate paragraph, so I’m not sure what it means. The last one is some sort of double talk. My rationality and your bet algorithm are, at best, poorly correlated. And the underlying assumption seems to be that rationality is proportional to belief payoff (i.e correctness?) I doubt you can validate that.

You can certainly catalog the negative aspects of death — both internal to the dying individual and external to his loved ones, his property assets, etc.

But does nothing positive balance against this? If I may pull out a simple accounting identity, surely the equity of your life runs something like

(all the good things about life + all the assets you build over your life) = (all the bad things about life & death + all the expenses you have through death) + (the equity of your life)

That is, A = L + E.

Viewed from a purely physical standpoint, the tendency of life to harvest the negative entropy (aka negentropy) from sunlight would suggest that, accounting until the end of one’s life, there is some net benefit (or equity or negentropy) at the end. We leave the world in a more ordered state than we entered it.

Maybe I’ve had too much coffee this morning. Probably there is a lesson here: former physicists with MBAs should not think too hard on philosophy.

To the extent that your premise has any validity (a point I am not willing to concede) you seem to be misidentifying as an accounting identity what is in (something closer to) fact, a non-arbitrage position.

Perhaps you can catalog the negative aspects of death, but you cannot be assured of completeness, and any attempt at quantification is doomed to failure.

Besides, you can only add things if they have the same units. The bad effects cannot all be denominated in dollars.

This much I will add, I have comments on both Bryan’s post and Adam’s post. There is a great need for emotional assistance for those who are depressed largely because they feel it is impossible to pay one’s own way financially, often because of debilitating illness or perhaps surgeries one cannot pay for. However, the mental health profession is, and has always been better equipped to handle depression/suicidal tendencies based on one’s social life, not one’s financial difficulties.

I am pleased to see the suicide fallacy examined, because as someone who writes about how (a) suicide is not always irrational or immoral and (b) it is better never to have been born, I hear it a lot. I have written extensively about how hard it is to kill oneself – else why would people fly to Switzerland and pay $50,000 for the service? Methods like jumping from heights, gunshot wound to the head, severing an artery, and hanging are not nearly as effective as people would like to believe (plus they’re bloody horrible). And think of the consequences if you fail. Worst case, you end up with akinetic mutism, with scientists doing medical experiments on you. Living out one’s natural life span, awful as it is, may not be as bad as that.

So, suicide is hard, success is not guaranteed, and the consequences are awful if you fail. But even if you succeed, as Karl points out, your family and friends and community must be thought of. We do often feel that these people have a claim on us, “own” us – even though we never signed up for that (with the exception of our children).

There is another thing to add: life is addictive. That is to say, there may be built-in evolved mechanisms to prevent one’s suicide, at least in the case where one’s suicide would not be beneficial to one’s inclusive fitness. (Strong evidence for this may be found in the fact that suicide is an increasing function of age for men, and mostly so in women, but jumps suddenly at menopause; that having young children and being pregnant are protective against suicide; and that men commit suicide more often than women.)

By the logic that we can tell that life has value from the lack of suicides, we should also conclude that doing meth, heroin, and crack are all very valuable and desirable, because look how few people who try them quit.

Finally, let me quickly address the idea that suicide is caused by depression. Let’s say that a depressed person committed a homicide. How quick would an expert witness be to testify that the mental illness caused the homicide? Very circumspect, yes? But there are tons of studies (with very suspicious methodology, I might add) that are willing to fly straight from co-morbidity (suicide + depression) to causation, no holds barred. Also, the modern diagnosis of “depression” (DSM-IV Major Depressive Disorder) has major problems.

Two strategies for those with suicidal tendencies, both based on the notion that life is a mystery and an existential challenge: 1, if you have any caregiving instincts at all, address the suicidal tendency as if a separate person who needs care and protection; and 2, consider that each human life is so short to begin with, that suicide is like jumping out of a plane without a parachute and shooting yourself on the way down. But having said that, there may be circumstances where it is the most compassionate, least awful solution for all concerned, and it should not have to be as traumatic as it is in our current world (palliative hospice care aside).

[…] exactly an Internet topic, I know, but I was struck by the Daily Dish’s call out to a post by Karl Smith: Most people are afraid of death in a way that they are not afraid of non-existence. Thinking about […]